Then, as karaoke concluded and when I thought I might get away with only that, a sudden decision was made to head downtown for some reason that was unclear to me. What was clear to me was that it was already midnight and I was very tired. I was actually pretty sober as I had not drunk much beer and the karaoke was, as is usual, alcohol free. Still, somehow, there was some fear of hangovers in our group and to address this fear we had to head downtown and drink more while having some soup.
We got to the restaurant after driving by a tableau of various drunken scenes. Taxis were swarming the downtown like flies and driving in their incredibly insane fashion. Every cab I've been in is a stickshift, and the drivers slalom around like Olympic skiers and just when it seems there has to be an accident they glide around it with the occasional beep of a horn. The lanes painted on the road aren't even advisory to these guys and traffic lights are treated with the kind of casual insouciance I associate with James Bond bantering with the mad criminal genius de jour.
This attitude towards driving, actually, is shared by all mobile Koreans. Motorcycles routinely careen down sidewalks (as do bicycles and several kinds of transportation that fall messily in between), buses drive like they can't see anything on the ground, cars park on curbs and up sidewalks and it's pretty much a miracle that the streets aren't painted with blood by each dawn. Which wouldn't be a tragedy, really, as each merchant would carefully clean the area in front of his store and by 9 am the evidence of last evening's abbattoir would be on its way through the sewer system. Work would resume as the survivors would have funerals to pay for.
Anyway... despite everything I anticipated, we lived until downtown and got another bottle of Soju and enormous bowls of soup. There was a sign --- well.. here is that sign..
And then the soup came. It looked dubious, even by the "if you can capture it, cut it, or conceive of fitting it into any kind of cooking apparatus it must be edible" standards of Korea. Here is a fuzzy picture of the thing.
It is time to step back a bit and note that I had asked Eddie not to tell me what I was eating before I tried it. This bowl, however, looked so much like Klingon food "Ghaaaak is better served alive!") that I broke my vow not to ask. Eddie reminded me of our deal and I said, "ok, I'll try it and then you tell me what it is." I chopsticked up one large piece of particularly noxious.. er... "stuff" and took a big bite. Eddie smiled and said... "congealed pig's blood."
FREAKING CONGEALED PIG'S BLOOD!
To my credit (I think?) I didn't vomit. I choked the whole thing down while focussing on the only ingredient in the soup I could actually identify, the rice. This beautiful "food" not only contained the congealed pig's blood, but also most of the part of the lower intestinal tract of a lamb.
Then I just focussed on the *extremely* drunk Korean guy who was sitting with a friend in the room behind us and wished I were dead.
No such luck.
When we tried to return to our apartment, no taxi would pick us up. There were 5 of us.. a problem for the small cabs in Seoul and particularly with a fat gajiin like me as one of the 5. The cabs would stop (well, "stop" in the sense of rolling by at about 10 miles an hour), hear our request and accelerate into the distance.
We finally got a cab by offering it our Secret Admirer's trip back across town and we were back to the apartment by just before 2. Just before 2, Eddie sagely noted, was still drinking time, and out came more Soju.
I staggered off to bed shortly thereafter. Typically, I woke up two hours before the Korean Krewe who seem to have highly developed "sleep it off" skills. I headed down to the PC Bang to drop off some work and the post I did yesterday. Got a call about 10 and headed back to the apartment for a breakfast of Kim Chee and rice.
As I type this Jae is heading down south on the bullet train and Eddie and I are hanging out on the warm floor watching the news. This afternoon we head down to see his father and stay down there. Eddie promises there won't be abusive drinking, but I'll believe that when I can't see my liver pulsing gelatinously through my varicose-vein shot skin.
After a nap we hopped on the 631 bus from Korea to Gimpo. This ran through some pretty gnarly traffic jams as one main street we were on was in the middle of extensive construction of some sort. This gave me a chance to goggle at the "apartment forests" as we drove through them. Koreans live in structures that don't appeal to some westerners as they are essentially apartments that one must purchase.
The original Korean housing looked something like migrant farm-worker motels in the States. A bunch of very small, one-story houses which were built wall to wall, though not necessarily in the shotgun style that might imply. Some were built on hills so the clusters extend upwards and sideways and are connected in whatever way then can be. The point of all that is Koreans are used to living cheek by jowl and when it came to building "homes" they went apartment style. Apartment style with a bit of a difference though, since a house needs to have a front and a back. This means most apartment/houses go all the way through the building and have a deck of some sort on the front and back. Eddie says that this is because traditionally (the Korean excuse for everything) people wanted houses the wind could blow all the way through when you opened the front and back doors. To this he gnomically added that women loved this and children hated it. He then returned to a bowl of something a bit awful which he ate with apparent gusto. An apartment building will normally consist of columns of apartments every two of which share a stairwell and elevator shaft. Here is my lame drawing of that:
Because of the cheek-by-jowl nature of these apartments, real estate is handled differently in Korea. I had read that you used different real-estate agents for different neighborhoods, but the buildings made clear why. You buy a "house" in Korea and you are also buying two very close neighbors - the people above and below you. There is no space to ameliorate sound or smell, or anything else. So the real-estate agent's job is not just to find the right "place," but also to get you into a good situation. Once you buy, you are stuck. This is probably not such a large problem in the newer units. I am currently at Ed's parent's unit and it seems very insulated from the neighbors. But our unit in Seoul is very different and if we had a noisy upstairs neighbor it would be a real drag.
Anyway, these apartments are built in close clusters and very tall. When you get among them it can be disorienting in a way that that is difficult to demonstrate without a crazy fisheye lens.
We rolled through them to Gimpo, where Ed's parents live in a very nice "house." It was high-school reunion night for Ed's dad, so we accompanied him to the re-union where he was able to announce Ed's marriage and various successes. Apparently I was a good visual aid to this, since I was clearly an English speaker and Ed was clearly able to communicate with me and make me feel at home. This is a good thing in Korea, because although everyone has technically learned English, that "technically" is in the same sense that some Catholic girls remain technical virgins. Korean schools apparently focus on reading and writing, not speaking, so fluency can be valuable.
The short version is Ed's dad seemed happy about everything and we returned to his house for some drinks and after-meal nosh. This is another nice thing about Korean drinking culture -- it is very rare to only drink.. there must be food accompanying drinking. Ed's mom really put on the dog (metaphorically!) as we had several kinds of nuts, raisins, passion fruit, Asian Pears (way superior to the US domestic version), peeled mandarin oranges, persimmons, Ginko seeds and lotus seeds. We went to sleep early, interrupted only when Ed's snoring drove me into another room. ;-)
Here is Ed's dad, after a few to many shots of Soju, attempting to rouse his geriatric fellow alumni into going up to the Joint Security Area (DMZ) and "re-unify those Damned Commies Right Now!" (That or he's pointing proudly at Ed)
It is now about 8:30 in the morning and only the spectre of a day with Mr. Park (not Ed's dad) darkens anything. This is a guy who made a very serious point of drinking me into a coma in the states, so I'm a bit worried. And in some kind of seizure, Ed agreed last night that we would move our meeting with Mr. Park from tonight up to 11 this morning. Not that we will get away any earlier as we have to spend the night down there.
Part of the experience I guess.
10 great things about Korea
1) Taxis everywhere and very cheap
2) The cell-phones you can rent at the airport
3) The PC Bang costs about $1.20 an hour (on the way to Gimpo actually saw one for 60 cents an hour)
4) You will never suffer a vitamin deficiency if you eat Korean food
5) Heated floors (this may be the single greatest achievement of the Korean culture across the centuries)
6) The "oh fuck it" approach to problems
7) The *first* bar we visit
8) The exchange rate is close enough to 1000 to 100 that you can understand what you are paying on the first day
9) Temples, of course
10) How Seoul lights up at night -- it's neon Xmas every night.
5 not-so-great things
1) Hae Jang whatever the Hell... ("kook", actually, which seems about right)
2) Crazy People on the 1 line (more about that later)
3) Koreans spit like they are Chinese
4) Korean chopsticks are made of slippery metal which they claim is more sanitary, but makes them slippery as hell.
5) The "last" bar we visit
TOMORROW: The Swine DO make me eat a living thing and what is it with the bathrooms?
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